A soft x-ray transmission grating imaging-spectrometer for the National Ignition Facility

A soft x-ray transmission grating spectrometer has been designed for use on high energy-density physicsexperiments at the National Ignition Facility(NIF); coupled to one of the NIF gated x-ray detectorsit records 16 time-gated spectra between 250 and 1000 eV with 100 ps temporal resolution. The trade-off between spectral and spatial resolution leads to an optimized design for measurement of emission around the peak of a 100–300 eV blackbody spectrum. Performance qualification results from the NIF, the TridentLaser Facility and vacuum ultraviolet beamlineat the National Synchrotron Light Source, evidence a <100 μm spatial resolution in combination with a source-size limited spectral resolutionthat is <10 eV at photon energies of 300 eV.